There were stiff words for my blanket denunciation last week of film stars who try their hands in bands - they can certainly afford to kit out their mates with Les Pauls and the works, so why shouldn't they have fun, ran the argument. Of course, there is considerable two-way traffic in this area. Musicians are not exactly shy about putting aside the lute, signing up for a couple of Stanislavskian tutorials and giving thesping a try. And (in my opinion) often with more interesting results...

1) There aren't enough ukeleles in films (perhaps an idea for a future Clip Joint!). The chief exponent, of course, is George Formby, whose cheeky grin, daft voice and racy syncopated strumming were once the very acme of entertainment.

2) Elvis Presley didn't take long to get his head around the advantages of brand diversity (they called it moonlighting in the 50s). But a face that cute and moves that smooth were wasted on the wireless, especially when there were jailhouses to rock.

3) Was Barbra Streisand a singer or an actor first? Like the first sub-atomic sparks that launched the Big Bang - an event not dissimilar to the opening bars of a Barb concert - this is a mystery from the dawn of time, to be contemplated only by true devotees. But we do know she won an Oscar for her first film foray in 1968's Funny Girl.

4) Plenty of rappers have turned out to be surprisingly good actors, from Ice Cube in Boyz N The Hood, to Ludacris in Crash. Ice-T gave it a pretty decent stab too, as an undercover cop, taking down Wesley Snipes' would-be Scarface. Those shoulder-padded pastel suits are surely a worse crime than any crack Snipes might be peddling to Brooklyn schoolkids.

5) David Bowie has that strange immobility lots of musicians have on screen, but has been invaluable in the right roles. Christopher Nolan, in a great piece of stunt casting, utilitises Dame Bowie's signature otherworldliness as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige.

1) Jennifer Lopez is, in many ways, the Latina Barbra Streisand, and a similar debate about her acting/singing origins is possible (technically speaking, she was acting first). But if even we don't, then at least she "knows where she came from", as she points out in the not-in-the-least-bit-conceited Jenny From the Block.

2) I always thought Minnie Driver was an actress first, but it actually turns out she started out as a singer. Now I'm confused: next they'll be telling me the egg came before the chicken. If you like Norah Jones, you might enjoy this inoffensive mellifluous twittering.

3) Post-buttkicking, what more is there to do with life? Why, play the blues. Steven Seagal, the Mojo Priest, is now taking his spiritual development on to a higher plane at a venue near you. If only he would get Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren in on bass and drums.

4) You can see why Gus Van Sant might have cast Michael Pitt as Blake, the Kurt Cobain surrogate in Last Days. Apparently, Pitt's own band, Pagoda, are of a grunge persuasion anyway but, all the same, he does a sharp impression (this, for the soundtrack).

5) Professor Dumbledore can go play on the motorway. Richard Harris should have spent more time crooning his lungs dry (preferably with wine bottle to hand) on regretful numbers like 1968's MacArthur Park.